All of Our Reasoning
by silvestras
Summary: '"I might give up victory," isn't something he's supposed to think. But if escapes the confines of the conscience he once locked away and forgot about, and wraps around him like chains.' Cato and Clove play a game.


**DISCLAIMER: I do not own The Hunger Games or anything of the sort. If I did there would probably be more messed-up ships (not that Peeta/Katniss isn't kind of messed up) in it than what would be deemed healthy. Suzanne Collins wrote it and she has the power, etc.**

**WARNINGS: Fade-to-black sex(?), making out, insanity, murder, descriptions of torture, swearing.**

* * *

><p>He can remember her last words, clear as a knife cut in his scalp, angry and bitter and oddly hopeful.<p>

"_Kill him_," she snarls, feeling the world start to dissipate around her, hearing Cato's pleads for her to stay.

Cato hears her, and looks down into her eyes and how, soon, they'll be glittering no more, and he realizes that he was wrong. Death doesn't defeat Clove the way he planned it would. He can see it plainly in the venom of her gaze even as life is slipping away from her.

The fire she used to start under his skin and inside him starts to cloud his mind and his vision, he'll see to it that Thresh dies a death fit for a traitor. He holds her face in his hands and feels the angles of her face dig into his palms the way her hips do against him during the nights when they play their own games. Hide-and-seek and tag have nothing to do with knives and nails and teeth, but they've always found ways to bend the rules to their own desires.

As he roars and runs after Thresh, he thinks, _No one else_.

No one else was allowed to kill her, to hurt her, and no one else was allowed to bruise him and batter him. They were supposed to be the last two, and the last death would be _beautiful_ and their mentors would be proud (and more than that, disgusted—that's what they were going for).

Eleven dared ruin that, and he would pay. He would pay _everything_, his life, his dignity and then some. Cato would make him suffer.

He doesn't believe in the afterlife, but as he pursues Eleven, howling with rage and (he'll never admit it) sorrow, he thinks, _I'll make you proud, Clove._

_I'll make you proud._

* * *

><p>Clove's hair is wet. Dark locks shine like snakeskin, clinging to her neck and to her shoulders and curling around patches of skin. Her green shirt is slightly torn somewhere below her belly, on her shoulders and on her left side. Cato knows where the tears in the fabric are. He knows them too well.<p>

When she turns, he can expect everything already, from the dark strokes of her eyebrows to the shape of her mouth to the way her cheekbones look in the light. He expects the way her lips quirk up when she sees him looking.

"Hungry?" she asks, smirking.

"No."

She turns away, shrugging. Cato can't help but track the way the cloth moves up a little as she does, the involuntary notion drawing a new line on a map in Cato's head.

Cato tears his eyes away from them and scans the perimeters again. A glance at Marvel; he nods an all clear. Maria looks around and shrugs, but her eyes are stormy. Logan's body isn't there to remind her, of course, but she knows very well that she's alone.

Glimmer settles somewhere near them, her once shiny and perfectly curled hair now sticking up in all directions. She washes her hair every day and Cato sneers at her. Only the weak think about the way their _hair_ looks in the Games.

The strong, like Clove, think about the satisfaction they get when knife cuts through flesh, and when the girl from Nine slumps forward, her once wheat-colored hair matted and sticky with blood, Clove smiles at Glimmer and says:

"Your hair will look just like that when I'm done with you."

Glimmer glares at her with brilliant emerald eyes, cut to razor-sharp hostility. The cannon sounds.

"You're underestimating me."

"She has no reason not to," Cato says, and Glimmer's face twists into something ugly but Clove merely chuckles and tosses their new kill aside, waiting for the coming hovercraft.

When it comes and Clove gazes upward, her eyes are glittering and black, like polished metal. He doesn't tear his eyes off the oblivion reflected in them.

The hovercraft carries the District Nine girl's body up and swallows it. Far up, it's safe from the savage wrath of the Tributes and the wild predatory instincts of the mutts, but safety means nothing when you're dead.

"That wasn't a bad show."

"That was _nothing_." Her eyes do not leave the sight above her, even when blood drips down and splatters on her forehead and on her cheek. He raises his hand to wipe it away for her, but she does it first.

Cato looks up and imagines the hovercraft carrying away Glimmer, Marvel, Maria and Peeta, their bodies damaged and their hearts stopped. But he cannot imagine it carrying Clove away from him.

* * *

><p>"Well? What's your name?"<p>

"You should know by now."

"I didn't listen. Didn't think it was important," she drawls, the knife pressing ever so slightly against his throat. He retaliates by gripping her wrist tighter, and her face betrays her for a second. Only the slightest flash of pain was visible, but it's enough to tell Cato that she's not invincible. Not that he thought she was. "Why not tell me now?"

"You owe me your name first."

"You know it already." She has the gall to laugh in his face, and he twists and pulls her arm, hard enough to make a sharp sound that cuts through the air. Her eyes flash but she doesn't make a sound.

A sting on his throat alerts him to the fact that she's drawn blood. If it were a sword she would have twisted its point in the wound, he thinks. Still, her face does not betray any sort of emotion. Not of triumph, not of pain.

Cato imagines strangling her, with his bare hands, feeling the life leak out of her body and the defiance fleeing her eyes. It's not a matter of _if_ but _when_, and he'll show her that he's nothing to laugh at. He'll show her, when he makes her sing in a death rattle.

He lets her go and, to her credit, she doesn't rub at the part where he had twisted it. Instead, she offers him a smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. The sharp angles of her face catch the light like a thrown knife, and Cato thinks he'll break those, and the bones will crunch underneath his fingers, and finally, she'll cave in. She'll _scream_.

"It's Cato," he says, keeping his face straight. She raises an eyebrow, still smiling.

"Clove," she replies, sticking out her uninjured hand, "but you knew that already."

He admits, grudgingly, that she is right.

* * *

><p>Cato has never been a romantic. He probably never will be.<p>

He never even gets close enough to 'almost romantic'.

Romance is disgusting, stupid, and most certainly a liability. You have no time to think about cuddles or chocolate or what a person means to you, not when they're in the way of victory. Cato would even call it nonexistent had he not encountered District Twelve's Lover Boy.

Lover Boy is the epitome of everything that's wrong about love. Everything about him, from his deer-in-the-headlights blue eyes to the way he looks across the water as if he's a brooding actor in a sad romantic movie, nauseates Cato. Even Glimmer, who's a little smitten with Mellark, will admit that he's so cheesy it's unreal.

It isn't that Mellark rambles on and on about Catnip Everspleen or whatever her name is every waking second of his pathetic life. He doesn't.

It's even worse because he does it while he's _asleep_.

"Kutt-ness…" he mumbles, rolling over on the ground like a dog playing dead. "I miss you. I _luuuve_ you… Where are you now?"

"I can't take this. I'm going on a walk," Clove says. "If you plan on joining me, wake someone up. Can't have Lover Boy's other half sneaking up and slitting everyone's throats."

Her footsteps fade into the lull of the woods and Cato gives her a thirty-, fifty-second head start before he hauls Marvel to his feet and goes after her like a shark having scented blood.

Marvel's protests don't matter any more than Peeta's rambling does, and Cato listens for her silence instead. He knows that she waits for him, her hand on the hilt of one of her knives, licking her lips as if she was the predator.

He walks in the dark, careful to hide the sound of his feet on the ground but he's never mastered that art, unlike Clove.

When she strikes, he expected it but it takes him by surprise nonetheless. A knife whizzes past him, barely missing his ear, and wedges itself in a tree trunk behind him. It glints maliciously in the barely-there light. He moves to retrieve it, and another knife seemingly sprouts from the spot next to his wrist.

Suddenly, Cato feels her pin him to the tree. He could overpower her so easily, but he lets her have this one. She chuckles against his throat and splays her fingers against his chest, pressing them hard against his skin, leaving a five-point star.

"Do you think the sponsors would send you another shirt if I cut this one to pieces?" The way she says it isn't quite a purr—her voice is high, cold, clear, the voice she'd use to talk to a kill.

He's tempted to say 'yes', because her fingers are tracing lines over her shirt and under, and her teeth are brushing against his skin as if she'd rip his throat out any second. She sets fire to everything she touches, but the heat is the heat you get after holding an ice cube to your skin. When you remove it the heat surges up and blooms just under the surface, up until you press it on again.

He can't give her that satisfaction.

"We have better things to ask for."

Cato grabs her by the wrists and flips their positions around, pushes her against the tree. She shows not a single sign of surprise. Instead, she smirks wickedly up at, and pulls her own arms back, and him along with them.

She kisses him and bites at his lower lip and there they are, again—openmouthed, still fighting and obsessed. The only thing Cato can think about is Clove and how he'd run through the Tributes with his sword and how she would throw her knives like silver darts. They'd be the only ones left standing, after all the trees are felled and the Tributes fall.

And this is how Clove would die: kissing Cato, and he would carve his name into her skin with her very own knife. He's changed his mind; he'll break everything but her face and watch her beauty wither and die. Then he'd make sure that the last word she breathed would be his name and nothing else, the name he'd given up to her on the day they met, the name she whispers all the time as if it were nothing at all.

The fire in his veins push at his skin and coil in his stomach, like a waking dragon. Clove pulls his shirt over his head, and for a moment her fingers ghost over the place where he needs them most ("You fucking tease," he growls, and she just looks even more pleased with herself). She presses her nails to his shoulder and pushes hard enough that beads of blood leaks out of it, and the fire spreads like a virus from there.

"Let me have Lover Boy's girl," she says, breaking apart from him (and she isn't even breathless), "and I promise you I'll give Panem a good show."

"No. I hate her more than anyone else. It's the only reason we took _him_ in, remember?"

"Mmm, but I could make it so _beautiful_, you know—maybe as beautiful as your death will be. Let me have her. I'll kill her and Lover Boy there will finally shut up when we're on night watch."

He laughs at that and says, "Fine. But I get Lover Boy."

"Oh, like I wanted _him_ anyways."

"What about our other 'allies'? Would you like to divide them up now?'

"Later," she says, and pushes herself against him again. Cato is inclined to agree.

* * *

><p>When Caesar Flickerman announces the rule change Cato and Clove head for a clearing and sit across each other, like two leaders of warring factions negotiating a truce during a feast, with poisoned goblets on the table and daggers under their cloaks.<p>

"Lover Boy will love that," he says, attempting to sound casual, but he can hear the _thump thump thump_ of blood in his ears, a drummer boy in a raging war.

"They don't actually believe it'll stick, don't they?" she muses absentmindedly.

He taps the ground in front of him with his fingers to the rhythm of his beating heart.

"I think they do. He's that dumb," he says. "It doesn't matter. I still plan on winning alone."

Oh, he's lying through his teeth here.

"So do I."

And apparently, so is she.

They do the equivalent of drinking from their goblets, as if they were immune to poison, and they take comfort in lies. This time, Cato runs first, into the darkness, and when Clove catches him they writhe and shed like hungry snakes, venomous fangs at each others' throats and hands tracing new routes along uncharted waters.

These maps are maps to be burned, he realizes, but that doesn't stop them from drawing them.

* * *

><p>Cato counts the deceased Careers on his fingers.<p>

_One: Logan. District Four. Male. Killed by Thresh in the bloodbath._

(He remembers the dust clearing and seeing Logan on the ground, broken, and he glanced at Clove, who looked far too calm about it, when Thresh has stolen from them, taken a kill and an ally that had been rightfully theirs.)

_Two: Glimmer and Maria. District One and Four. Female. Killed by the tracker jackers dropped on them by Katniss Everdeen._

(Cato cuts Mellark, that sniveling traitor, but the tracker jackers had had their way with him.

He can feel the beaks of birds tear his eyeballs out and a pool of acid boiling underneath him, consuming his legs. Golden-furred wolves bite at his arms. His blood becomes acid even as it flows, dripping down into the pool below, carving into his skin like rivers eroding the ground.

He howls until Clove calls out, "Cato!" and cuts through the beasts of his mind. He stumbles, clawing at the birds, and runs back to her, where she tears the wolves off him and drains the acid away.)

_Three: Blip. District Three. Male. Killed by Cato in a fit of rage after he'd failed them._

(When everything clears, he sees Marvel standing warily at a safe distance and he feels Clove holding him steady.

"You killed Blip," she says, the derision in her voice obvious. "Idiot."

She takes her hands off him and looks up, again, waiting for the hovercraft, as if she were an angel of death delivering a soul to the sky.

Blip's head lolls lifelessly on the ground, his eyes blank. The intelligence they used to hold has disappeared. Briefly, Cato wonders if they same thing could happen to Clove, could happen to him. He's always thought that he was stronger. Invincible.

When night falls and it becomes clear that the bomber is not dead, they all think, _Twelve_.

That one girl who was supposed to die early; that one girl who always escapes.)

_Four: Marvel. District One. Male. Killed by an arrow through the neck, courtesy of Katniss Everdeen._

(Only when they see his face in the sky that night do they realize what this means, what has been taken away from them, what was rightfully theirs. The cannon wasn't for Five or Eleven or Twelve, even. It was for One.

Clove's fingers flutter across his arm and Cato looks at her, for a moment, and her eyes are cold and hungry for revenge. He can see Everdeen's death playing out under Clove's quick and clever hands, he can see her drawing blood and painting a canvas with the colors of glory.

"Everdeen is all yours," he says.

"I know."

She grabs him and kisses him again, but only for a second, and Cato thinks a single, traitorous thought. _I might give up victory_ isn't something he's supposed to think. But if escapes the confines of the conscience he once locked away and forgot about, and wraps around him like chains.

Then she leaves him and Cato yells, "Come back to me when you're victorious!" but he chases after her anyway.)

_Five: Clove. District Two. Female. Killed by Thresh with a rock to the head._

(When he arrives and sees her on the ground, as Everdeen sprints away, he thinks, _No, no, no, no_.

In her eyes he sees a flash of fear that shouldn't be there. This isn't Clove and the way she's breathing is frightening, because soon she won't be breathing at all. She's unraveling and pulling together at the same time. This isn't how she's supposed to die.

Her hair tangles up in Cato's fingers and he can only sob helplessly.

"Weakling," she manages to say. That's not something she deserves to say, not when she's the one dying. Cato was supposed to break her, and now she'll die unbroken, she'll die undefeated, still. He turns away, grabs a few of her knives, and runs before the hovercraft takes her, because her body will cause an eclipse, cutting through the sun.

His plan is being torn to pieces.)

_Five: Clove. Killed by Thresh with a rock to the head._

("Stay with me," he begs.

But she was always so defiant, wasn't she?)

_Five: Clove._

(They spar in the forest, away from Glimmer and Marvel who seem to do something different, _weaker,_ to train. Clove's knives are out and she's spinning them around for show, but Cato doesn't need that. He unsheathes his sword and she smiles; both sharp, both dangerous.

She somehow blocks his attacks with two of her knives, leveling them cleverly and almost managing to knock him off balance, once, but he's much stronger than her and she must be dumber than she looks if she thinks she can beat him in close combat.

He imagines her body pierced with a thousand sword wounds, and licks his lips. She would be his finest kill. His masterpiece.

And yet Clove is only moving closer and closer, somehow managing to parry and dodge all his strikes. When she knocks away his sword, does something with her hands and _twists_, he doesn't understand a thing.

A second later and they're on the ground, her on top of him, and then she kisses him.

Cato makes no move to push her off, wondering what she's planning, because she's always scheming, always thinking one step ahead. Playing along is usually the easiest way to go about life when you are an ally of Clove's.

It all feels too real, too dangerous in a way he's never considered before, her lips against his and her tongue prying open his mouth.

_Two can play at this game_, he thinks, and he starts to kiss back violently. Clove doesn't seem to mind the least bit.

He pulls away, assessing the situation. Their eyes meet and he smirks at her. There is more than one game, one competition going on in the Arena now. Cato can see himself winning both; it would be as easy as flipping his hand over, as easy as kissing her like he used to do to all the other girls, as easy as sticking his sword through someone's neck.

"Whoever gives up victory loses," Clove says. "And all's fair in lust and war."

"Fine," he says, noticing how she changed the phrase. It's obvious that whoever loses will bear more than that.

She pushes herself off him, gets up, and runs back to the Cornucopia. Cato takes off after her, feeling confident and high on the promise of not one, but _two_ victories.)

_Five._

(He falters mid-run and remembers her. He remembers the way she would sit under the sun, the way she swings her arm when she throws, the face she makes when she feels annoyed by something idiotic.

Cato sighs irritably.

All that's left is to win the other game, and he clenches his fists when he realizes that she died thinking of him as a weakling. He snarls, involuntarily.

The fury returns to set him off again like a rocket and a pang echoes, somewhere inside him. It's an emptiness he's not ready to define.)

_Five._

("Thresh!" he roars when he catches up with him. Thresh seems calm, unruffled, but he will break soon enough.

Cato will hit him until he calls for his mother and his father and his ancestors, until he calls Clove back from the dead and makes her break him all over again. Cato will make it so disgusting, so glorious, that Enobaria and Tarquinius will turn the television off in horror. And Clove will see that he's not weak.

He locks away whatever voice it was that almost told him to give up his victory. It doesn't belong anywhere near him.)

_Five: Clove. Clove. Clove. Clove. Clove. Clove._

The name echoes, bouncing off the walls of his skull, smashing them from the inside. Cato _laughs_ because that's all he can manage to do. Clove's cold, blood-stained fingers seem to be grappling at his throat and her voice laughs with him, clear, high, cold and murderous, inside the confines of the prison of his mind.

(Or is that his heart? It might be, if Cato had one.)

* * *

><p>The rain makes the ground slippery with mud, but Cato can see Clove behind Thresh, waiting to strike, the raindrops making her skin glitter in the somehow still-shining sun.<p>

It's been two days now, and neither Thresh nor Cato has fallen, although their movements have been tempered by exhaustion. Cato still feels fury ricochet off the walls of his skin inside of him, his hands screaming for a chance to kill.

And then Clove came sauntering in, as if she had all the right to be there.

He smiles. She smiles back.

Something begins to rush through his veins, something that wasn't there before, and Cato feels all the energy he's lost return to him suddenly. Thresh seems to notice this, his movements now taking him farther away. He looks at Cato more warily. He has the right to be wary.

Clove waits.

He can see her move, and he moves with her, striking where she strikes. He can hear Clove laughing again and again as he cuts Thresh behind the knee, severing tendons. He stabs through three different places where he knows the wounds won't be fatal.

When Thresh falls, Clove kicks him to the ground, although that might have been Cato's foot, not hers.

(It's not like Cato minds, though. After this they can take care of Twelve together, and maybe he still gets to kill her in the end. Can you kill someone if they're dead? Cato ponders this for a second.)

Thresh screams in agony. Clove laughs harder behind Cato, around him, inside his head. Cato kneels as Clove holds Thresh down for him, still smiling, now whispering "_Cato, Cato, Cato,_" into the air. She matches the rhythm of the falling rain.

"You shouldn't have taken what was mine," he growls, and he lifts him up and throws Thresh to the ground again. Clove looks incredibly pleased, as if she did all the work. Her dark eyes are dancing with delight.

Thresh screams again. He looks as if his mouth isn't wide enough to release all the pain he needed to throw out.

"I think I can fix that," Cato says, and he remembers what Clove said she would've done to Katniss. This would be both Cato and Clove's kill, their shared glory. He grins and looms over the other Tribute, and raises Clove's knife above his head.

"Cheese."

He carves a grin through his cheeks, painting the new edges of his mouth bright red over and over again as the water keeps on erasing the work he's done before. Clove laughs on and on, touching Cato's cheeks like the raindrops and running her fingers through his hair like cold water.

There's a nagging corner of Cato's mind that tells him, _she isn't there at all, and she was never all there in the first place_, but it's a very quiet corner, and Clove's laughter drowns it out like the way Cato is being drenched by the fury of the skies.

"Thresh looks beautiful like that, don't you think, Cato?"

"Is this what you wanted for her? I'll do it again, if that's what you wish." He asks, holding him up as if he were something just for Clove's entertainment. Everything he did to Thresh was for her, and she'd better appreciate it.

"Exactly what I wanted. But you'll have to make _their_ deaths better than this. You're smart enough to at least come up with a greater show. You lost our game. Can't afford to lose another, can you?"

"I'm not going to lose," he insists.

"If you say so." A pause. "Cato, I think our little friend is tired of us talking."

"Don't want to listen to us gloating, do you?" Cato asks Thresh, who does not respond. "Don't want to see me walking around like this, all arrogant and shit? Does that bother you? Do we bother you?"

Cato stretches Thresh's ear out, and Clove hands him a knife.

"You won't have to be bothered anymore."

* * *

><p>After that, Cato slings his sword over his shoulder and begins to walk towards the Cornucopia. It's time to find Twelve. He doesn't know what to think or say, but with Clove walking alongside him, he knows everything will go according to plan.<p>

(Well, at least the plan he's scraped from the remains of the original, which ran to the ground and collapsed pathetically the moment Thresh—)

Her footsteps fade into silence beside him, into the still air. He turns to her, intending to ask her if she has any ideas but when he does, she isn't there. Cato feels his pulse quicken with panic and rage.

_How dare she,_ he thinks, but the thought doesn't complete itself. It conveniently ended at the third word. Cato thinks it again: _How dare she._

Turning around again and again, he spots a flash of dark hair disappear in the trees, along with pale fingers clutched around a mirror-like knife. Cato chases after her, screaming her name into the woods and the embrace of the branches.

But she does not return.

"Stay with me! Clove!" he cries out again. His anger mixes with confusion and despair. This isn't how he's supposed to think when victory is only a knife-throw away. And yet—and yet he cannot stop himself.

Just like he couldn't stop himself when Clove has him in her clutches, when she touches him and renders him blind.

He knows he can take Twelve down, Clove or no Clove, but her mere presence gave him more energy than he thought was possible after you've been fighting for two days. You can call it rush of bloodlust to the head.

"Fuck," he swears loudly. "Fuck this shit."

Her two remaining knives sit in his hand, as if smiling smugly at him with the curve of their blades.

Cato swallows hard, flushing down a strange lump in his throat, and sets off again without looking back. No rest for the wicked, or so they say.

* * *

><p>One of the wolves, he notices, has eyes that are filled with the color of death, darker and a thousand times more morbid than black. The shine of its fur ripples across its flank, and its teeth, reflective like throwing knives, are bared at him in the most menacing way possible.<p>

Tarquinius is probably sitting in front of a television somewhere in a glitzy Capitol building, his favorite cocktail from that club, The Tributuary, in hand, quoting something he thinks is clever, like:

"Et tu, Brute?"

And for a moment the wolf is Clove, radiating an aura of absolute hate, her expression unforgiving, her stance mocking. Her teeth become like the wolf's teeth, drawn back in an inhuman snarl.

Cato shudders and lets go of his breath. They jump, teeth and claws out and ready.

And he waits for her touch to set him on fire again.

* * *

><p><strong>Title comes from a Blaise Pascal quote that goes as follows:<strong>

**"All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling."**


End file.
